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Channel 4 had made the woeful decision to kowtow to the misguided complainants who crawled out of their joyless pits after some of his previous shows to mewl and puke that ordinary people could not be expected to make lifesize birdcages from spun sugar and fill them with talking parrots made of foie gras, seaweed feathers and working potato larynxes – as if that were the point of him! As if that were the point! – and forced him to cut his crazy-cloth accordingly. But why? Why would you do that? Why would you take Heston Blumenthal, put him in a programme called How to Cook Like Heston and not let him be Heston Blumenthal? It’s like buying a banana and keeping only the skin. And not even to caramelise it over a guttering candle and stuff it with pistachio-flavoured olive tapenade and Space Dust like Heston would. Idiots.

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What continues to amaze me is that people who scorn the value of wind energy are often also the most fervent believers in free markets and their apparently magical power to match supply and demand. The UK’s electricity market is far from perfect, but it is quite robust enough to handle a near hurricane, followed by unexpected falls in wind speed. What further demonstrations that wind turbines are effective providers of electricity could possibly be required? Today’s weather might have been more of a problem had the UK had 30,000 wind turbines rather than 3,000 but as of early 2012 the freely functioning electricity market is coping very well indeed with intermittency.